“While Johnsontreads much of the same territory here as in his 1992 cult classic [Jesus’ Son]—addiction, crime, obsession, psychedelic transcendence—his final book is overall more concerned with what follows such madness. If Jesus’ Son proclaims, ‘Holy shit, after all the drugs and alcohol and violence, I can’t…

“In the last five years I’ve been arrested about eight times, shot twice, not twice on one occasion but once on two different occasions, etc etc and I think I got run over once but I don’t even remember it.” The narrator of “The Starlight On Idaho” in Denis Johnson’s The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden writes this from an…

This morning, The Washington Post,NPR, and other news outlets are reporting that National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson has died. Widely considered one of the greatest writers of his generation, the playwright, poet, and fiction writer died Thursday, according to president and publisher of Farrar, Straus &…

After publishing nearly 20 books, including novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and plays, Denis Johnson doesn’t get nearly the recognition he deserves for the sheer diversity of his work. He was bestowed with a National Book Award in 2007 for what many called “his big book,” Tree Of Smoke, a sprawling imagistic…